Tag Archives: savings

In part 1, we discussed how data reduction ratios can, and do, vary significantly between customers and datasets and that making assumptions on data reduction ratios, even when vendors provide guarantees, does not protect you from potentially serious problems if the data reduction ratios are not achieved.

In Part 2 we will go through an example of how misleading data reduction guarantees can be.

One HCI manufacturer provides a guarantee promising 10:1 which sounds too good to be true, and that’s because it, quite frankly, isn’t true. The guarantee includes a significant caveat for the 10:1 data reduction:

The savings/efficiency are based on the assumption that you configure a backup policy to take at least one <redacted> backup per day of every virtual machine on every<redacted> system in a given VMware Datacenter with those backups retained for 30 days.

I have a number of issues with this limitation including:

The use of the word “backup” referring directly/indirectly to data reduction (savings)

The use of the word “backup” when referring to metadata copies within the same system

No actual deduplication or compression is required to achieve the 10:1 data reduction because metadata copies (or what the vendor incorrectly calls “backups”) are counted towards deduplication.

It is important to note, I am not aware of any other vendor who makes the claim that metadata copies ( Snapshots / Point in time copies / Recovery points etc.) are deduplication. They simply are not.

I have previously written about what should be counted in deduplication ratios, and I encourage you to review this post and share your thoughts as it is still a hot topic and one where customers are being oversold/mislead regularly in my experience.

Now let’s do the math on my claim that no actual deduplication or compression is required to achieve the 10:1 ratio.

Let’s use a single 1 TB VM as a simple example. Note: The size doesn’t matter for the calculation.

Take 1 “backup” (even though we all know this is not a backup!!) per day for 30 days and count each copy as if it was a full backup to disk, Data logically stored now equals 31TB (1 TB + 30 TB).

The actual Size on disk is only a tiny amount of metadata higher than the original 1TB as the metadata copies pointers don’t create any copies of the data which is another reason it’s not a backup.

Then because these metadata copies are counted as deduplication, the vendor reports a data efficiency of 31:1 in its GUI.

So the only significant capacity savings which are guaranteed come from “backups” not actual reduction of the customer’s data from capacity saving technologies.

As every modern storage platform I can think of has the capability to create metadata based point in time recovery points, this is not a new or even a unique feature.

So back to our topic, if you’re sizing your infrastructure based on the assumption of the 10:1 data efficiency, you are in for rude shock.

Dig a little deeper into the “guarantee” and we find the following:

It’s the ratio of storage capacity that would have been used on a comparable traditional storage solution to the physical storage that is actually used in the <redacted> hyperconverged infrastructure. ‘Comparable traditional solutions’ are storage systems that provide VM-level synchronous replication for storage and backup and do not include any deduplication or compression capability.

So if you, for example, had a 5 year old NetApp FAS, and had deduplication and/or compression enabled, the guarantee only applies if you turned those features off, allowed the data to be rehydrated and then compared the results with this vendor’s data reduction ratio.

So to summarize, this “guarantee” lacks integrity because of how misleading it is. It is worthless to any customer using any form of enterprise storage platform probably in the last 5 – 10 years as the capacity savings from metadata based copies are, and have been, table stakes for many, many years from multiple vendors.

So what guarantee does that vendor provide for actual compression and deduplication of the customers data? The answer is NONE as its all metadata copies or what I like to call “Smoke and Mirrors”.

Summary:

“No one will question your integrity if your integrity is not questionable.” In this case the guarantee and people promoting it have questionable integrity especially when many customers may not be aware of the difference between metadata copies and actual copies of data, and critically when it comes to backups. Many customers don’t (and shouldn’t have too) know the intricacies of data reduction, they just want an outcome and 10:1 data efficiency (saving) sounds to any reasonable person as they need 10x less than I have now… which is clearly not the case with this vendors guarantee or product.

Apart from a few exceptions which will not be applicable for most customers, 10:1 data reduction is way outside the ballpark of what is realistically achievable without using questionable measurement tactics such as counting metadata copies / snapshots / recovery points etc.

In my opinion the delta in the data reduction ratio between all major vendors in the storage industry for the same dataset, is not a significant factor when making a decision on a platform. This is because there are countless other substantially more critical factors to consider. When the topic of data reduction comes up in meetings I go out of my way to ensure the customer understands this and has covered off the other areas like availability, resiliency, recoverability, manageability, security and so on before I, quite frankly waste their time talking about table stakes capability like data reduction.

I encourage all customers to demand nothing less of vendors than honestly and integrity and in the event a vendor promises you something, hold them accountable to deliver the outcome they promised.

I published a post earlier this month during the .NEXT conference titled “What’s .NEXT? – Erasure Coding!” which covered the basics of Nutanix EC-X implementation.

This post is a deep drive follow on to answer numerous questions I have received about EC-X such as:

1. Does it work with Compression and De-duplication?
2. Can I use EC-X to reduce the overhead of RF3?
3. Does it work on Hot or Cold data?
4. Does it work only on the SATA tier?
5. What is the performance impact?
6. When should I use/not use EC-X?
7. What’s different about Nutanix (Patent pending) EC-X compared to other EC algorithms?
8. How does EC-X impact Data Locality?
9. What Hypervisors is EC-X supported with?

So let’s start with What’s different about Nutanix (Patent pending) EC-X compared to other EC algorithms?

* Nutanix EC-X is optimized for a distributed platform, where data is spread across nodes, not individual disks to ensure optimal performance. This also ensures rebuild times are faster and lower impact as the rebuild is performed across all the nodes/drives.

* Nutanix EC-X is also performed as a background task and only on Write Cold data meaning the configured RF is completed as normal and then as a post process EC-X is performed to ensure the write process is not potentially slowed by requiring numerous nodes within the cluster to participate in the initial write I/O.

How does EC-X affect existing Nutanix Data Reduction technologies.

* Short answer, EC-X is complimentary to both compression and deduplication so you will get even more data reduction. Here is a sample screen shot from the Home screen in PRISM which shows a breakdown of Dedup, Compression and Erasure Coding savings.

In the Storage Tab within PRISM, we can get further details on the capacity savings. Here we see an example Container with Compression and EC-X enabled:

Does it work only on the SATA tier?

No, EC-X works on all tiers, being SSD and SATA today, but in the future when newer technology or more than two tiers are used, EC-X works across all tiers.

Does EC-X work on Hot or Cold data?

EC-X waits until data written (via RF2 or RF3) is “Write Cold”, meaning the data is not being overwritten. The data might be white hot from a read I/O perspective, but as long as its not being overwritten the extent group (4MB) will be a candidate for EC-X.

This means for data which is Write Cold, the effective capacity of the SSD tier will be increased due to requiring less space thanks to EC-X.

What is the performance impact?

As EC-X is a post process task and EC-X waits until data is “Write Cold” before performing EC-X on the data, in general it will not impact the Write performance.

The exception to this is in the event data is Write Cold for a period of time, then the data is overwritten, this “overwrite” will incur a higher penalty than a typical RF2/RF3 write. As such some workloads may not be suitable for EC-X which I will discuss later.

Overall, if the workload is suitable, EC-X will keep the data in the SSD tier and the parity on the SATA tier which effectively extends the usable capacity of the SSD tier therefore helping to increase performance (as with compression and dedup).

What Hypervisors is EC-X supported with?

Everything in the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (part of the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform or XCP) is designed to be hypervisor agnostic. So whatever Hypervisor/s you choose, you can benefit from EC-X!

How does EC-X impact Data Locality?

As the initial Write path is not impacted by enabling EC-X, Data Locality is still maintained and ensures one copy of data is written to the local node where the VM is running while replicating a further one or two copies (dependent on RF configuration) throughout the cluster.

This means that for newly written data as well as data being overwritten at frequencies of <60mins will always maintain data locality.

For data which meets the criteria for EC-X to be performed, such as Read Hot or Write Cold data, Data Locality can only be partially maintained as the data is by design striped across nodes. The result of this means that it is probable Read I/O will be performed over the network.

Importantly though Read Hot data will be maintained in the SSD tier and be distributed throughout the cluster. This means a single VMs read I/O can be served by multiple nodes concurrently which can lead to increased performance.

As EC-X also provides capacity savings, this allows for more data to be serviced by the SSD tier which enabled a larger active working set to perform at SSD speeds.

In summary, while Data Locality is not always maintained when using EC-X, the advantages of EC-X far outweigh the partial loss in Data Locality.

And finally, When should I use/not use EC-X?

As discussed earlier, EC-X is applied to Write Cold data and if/when that data is overwritten, the write penalty is higher than a typical RF2 write I/O. So if your dataset has a high percentage of overwrites, it is recommended not to use EC-X. The good news is storage can be assigned on a per VMDK level (or vDisk at the NDFS layer) so you can have one VM using EC-X for some data and RF2/3 for other data, again giving customers the best of both worlds.

The best workloads for EC-X are:

1. File Servers
2. Backup
3. Archive
4. Email
5. Logging

Summary:

Nutanix EC-X gives customers more choice without compromising functionality and performance while dramatically reduces the cost/GB of storage.

I saw the below picture posted on Twitter, and there has been some discussion around the de-duplication ratio (shown below as an an amazing 28.4:1) and what this should and should not include.

In the above case, this ratio includes VM snapshots or what some people in my opinion incorrectly refer to as “backups” (But that’s a topic for another post). In other storage solutions, things like savings from intelligent cloning may also be included.

First l’d like to briefly explain what de-duplication means to me.

I think the below diagram really sums it up well. If 12 pieces of data exist (ie: Have been written or are in the process of being written in the case of in-line de-duplication) to the storage layer, de-duplication (in-line or post process) removes the duplicate data and uses pointers to direct duplicates back to a single copy rather than storing duplicates.

Obviously, if data that exists or is being written to a storage system and its de-duplicated in-line or post process, this data reduction should be included in the ratio. I’d be more than a little surprised if anyone disagreed on this point.

The one exception to this is where VMDKs are Eager Zeroed Thick (EZT) and de-duplication is simply removing 0’s which in my opinion is simply putting additional load on the storage controllers and over inflating the de-duplication ratio when thin provisioning can be used.

For storage solutions de-duplicating zeros from EZT VMDKs, these capacity savings should be called out as a separate line item. (Discussed later in this post).

What about Intelligent cloning? Well the whole point of intelligent cloning is not to write or have the storage controllers process duplicate data in the first place. So based on this, VMs which are intelligently cloned are not deduped as duplicate data is never written or processed.

As such its my opinion Intelligent cloning savings should not be included in the de-duplication ratio.

Next lets talk “point in time snapshot recovery points“.

The below image shows the VM before a snapshot (a.) has blocks A,B,C & D.

Then after a snapshot without modifications, the VM has the same blocks A,B,C & D.

Then finally, when the VM makes modifications to or deletes data after the snapshot, we see the A,B,C & D remain in tact thanks to the snapshot but then we have a deleted item (B) then modified data (D+) along with net new data E1 & E2.

So savings from snapshots are also not “de-duplicating” data, they are simply preventing new data being written, much like intelligent cloning.

As with Intelligent cloning savings, my opinion is savings from snapshots should not be included in the de-duplication ratio.

Summary

In my opinion, the de-duplication ratio reported by a storage solution should only include data which has been written to disk (post process), or was in the process of being written to disk (in-line) that has been de-duplicated.

But wait there’s more!

While I don’t think capacity savings from Intelligent cloning and snapshots should be listed in the de-duplication ratio, I think these features are valuable and the benefits of these technologies should be reported.

I would suggest a separate ratio be reported, for example, Data Reduction.

The Data reduction ratio could report something like the following where all capacity savings are broken out to show where the savings come from:

For storage solutions, the effective capacity of each storage tiers (Memory/SSD/HDD) for example could also be reported as a result of the data reduction savings.

This would allow customers to compare Vendor X with Vendor Y’s deduplication or compression benefits, or compare a solution which can intelligently clone with one that cannot.

Conclusion:

The value of deduplication, point in time snapshots and intelligent cloning in my mind are not in question, and I would welcome a discussion with anyone who disagrees.

I’d hate to see a customer buy product “X” because it was advertised to have a 28.4:1 dedupe ratio and then find they only get 2:1 because they don’t for example take 4 hourly snapshots of every VM in the environment.

The point here is to educate the market on what capacity savings are achieved and how so customers can compare apples with applies when making purchasing decisions for datacenter infrastructure.